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you for five times that amount”.
Over 600 German recipients of the letter were sufficiently scared by the threat
of a costly legal process to pay up. Even if some of them were in fact
innocent, or if they just felt that 1,200 euro was a pretty unreasonable
punishment for having watched a movie (that wasn’t even particularly successful
at the box office) for free, they decided it was not worth the risk to have
their day in court.
     
    Sweden, on the other hand, has so far mostly been spared this type of
behavior by the rights holders. This is because we used to have laws that
prevented the Internet service providers from disclosing information about
which of its customers had a certain IP number at a certain time, according to
Swedish data protection laws. Instead, the film and record companies have had
to file a criminal complaint and let the police investigate if a crime has been
committed. This is not enough for the rights holders, since the criminal
justice system does not have the capacity to get the volumes up to the level
that the rights holders want.
     
    This may change, however, now that Sweden has implemented the Intellectual
Property Rights Enforcement Directive “IPRED”, and is working to
implement the Data
Retention Directive as well. These two directives were designed from
the outset to work in tandem, in order to give rights holders the practical
means to implement the strategy of legal threats.
     
    The Data Retention Directive forces the Internet service providers to
keep logs that connect an IP number to one of their customers, and the Ipred
directive is intended to ensure that the rights holders and their anti-piracy
organizations can demand to get access to the information. If implemented the
way the rights holders want them to be, these two directives together open up
the door for US-style legalized blackmail of ordinary citizens.
     
    The fundamental problem is that if laws have the effect of enabling
private companies to set up their own enforcement system where the vast
majority of cases are handled outside the courts, citizens can no longer expect
due process to be observed. The important thing is not what might happen in the
court of last instance, but the cost of getting there. If you as a citizen
cannot afford to take the risk of having your case tried in a proper manner,
you are being denied justice in practice.
     
    ...And It Isn’t Working Anyway
    In June 2010, I (Christian Engström) attended a working group meeting on
copyright enforcement in the European Parliament. As guests, we had
representatives from the Motion Picture Association MPA, and from the record
producers’ organization IFPI. These two organizations represent the hard core
of the copyright lobby.
     
    The representative from IFPI talked about how many fantastic things the
record companies would put on the market, if only online piracy could be
eliminated or reduced. To achieve this, she was asking for information
campaigns aimed at Internet users, and stricter sanctions against copyright
infringers.
     
    She showed a slide with the words
     
    “The music industry favours an approach
which combines the information of Internet users, with sanctions for persistent
infringers.”
     
    This is exactly what the copyright industry always says, and has been
saying for over a decade. Information campaigns about copyright directed at
Internet users, and sanctions handed out by the Internet service provider
companies, preferably without any involvement of courts.
     
    But leaving all other aspects aside, do we have any reason to think that
this will be effective?
     
    When it was my turn to ask a question, I reminded IFPI and the MPA that
they have more than a decade’s experience of this strategy, in both the US and
Europe. It was in 1998 that DMCA ,
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, was adopted in the US. In Europe we have
seen a number new laws for stricter enforcement being introduced over the
years, notably the 2001